Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Other interruptions arose from the temptations of ordinary social life. Some were business details, many of which Howard handled. But his temperament and his situation made Gore constantly available to calls, to requests for help, for participation in one thing or another, whether personal or social or political. Just before mid-November he went for five days to “The First Show Magazine Inter-American Symposium,” at Paradise Island in the Bahamas, one of those irresistible invitations. Among the nineteen North American participants were Max Lerner, whom he had heard lecture at Exeter, the playwright Edward Albee, the composer Aaron Copland, and the dancer Katherine Dunham. Arthur Schlesinger and William Styron attended. So too did Norman Podhoretz, the young editor of the New York Jewish intellectual magazine Commentary, and Richard Goodwin, now a member of the Kennedy administration, who when he had come to Dutchess County in 1960 as a Kennedy advance man had stayed at Edgewater. Nini was delighted to accept his invitation that she join him there. (Later Gore discovered that the symposium had been sponsored by the CIA.) Though he had sufficient discipline to shut himself off for a certain number of hours each day, usually from morning into midafternoon, the discipline took its toll, the interruptions still came.

  Since he could write anyplace, he began to think more and more about spending half of the next year abroad, in one of the places that had always gripped his imagination, where he could work on Julian free from the pressure of interruptions, some of them inevitably irresistible, that he had at home. Athens had appealed to him. Rome was always close to his heart, “Roman fever” a lifelong happy disease. He had no intention, though, of living abroad permanently. His thought was to spend part of the next year in Rome, with frequent pleasurable visits to Greece and other places. That seemed acceptable to Howard, who was not enthusiastic about even that schedule. Howard saw no reason, for himself, to leave Edgewater and New York. What would it mean to his own latent desire to have some sort of career, particularly to sing professionally, though he recognized that his difficulty with stage fright and his lack of training were formidable obstacles? Still, he had a full life at home. If he went abroad with Gore, that life would have to be re-created. They would be thrown back more on one another, Howard particularly on Gore. Was that a commitment he wanted to make, an experience he wanted to embrace? In the late fall, suddenly, Howard became ill. Potentially life-threatening cancer seemed likely. “At first Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital was so crowded they couldn’t take him in,” Gore recalled. In the three weeks that it took to get admitted, during which they worried that this might be cancer, Gore tried every conceivable contact that might help expedite admission. “We pulled all sorts of strings.” Finally, in late November, he had this “big thing cut out of his throat, a benign growth but a huge one on the thyroid…. Frank Merlo,” Tennessee Williams’s longtime companion, “had just come to the hospital to die, so Tennessee and I would go there together. He’d visit Frank, and I’d visit Howard.” During the surgery Gore paced the halls, the streets. Suddenly one of the foundations of his life was threatened, and though there were never explicit words to this effect between them, clearly the threat was to the one person in the world he cared most about. “I remember once,” Joanne Woodward recalls, “when Howard had a cancer and there was the possibility … He was terrified. Oh, he loves Howard very much. I don’t know that he would ever say that…. Sex is sex, right! But … Howard’s the only person I know with whom he’s had a long-term relationship. I’m sure it wasn’t a sexual relationship. Gore found in Howard the perfect caretaker of the legend.” The growth was removed, the surgery successful. By Christmas he was out of the hospital.

  With a deep sigh of relief, they went ahead with Roman plans. Through a contact they had subleased for a year an apartment in Rome’s old city. Howard, heavily bandaged, would stay on in New York for the rest of his recovery, perhaps a few weeks at most before he could fly, and to make the necessary business arrangements for Edgewater and the brownstones. Then he would join Gore in Rome. Before leaving New York, Gore received a telegram from Nina. “HEAR YOU’RE LEAVING FOR A YEAR. THINK WE BETTER GET TOGETHER AND MAKE UP OR HAVE A GOOD FIGHT. HAPPY NEW YEAR LOVE BOMMY.” He did not respond. In late January 1963, after sailing to Naples and taking the train up to Rome, Gore took possession of a furnished apartment at 4 Via Giulia, between the Tiber and the Campo dei Fiore. One of his first meals was at a restaurant that was to become a favorite, La Carbonara, at the top of the Campo dei Fiore, facing the black statue of Giordano Bruno, who had been burned there as a heretic in 1600. The beneficent Roman winter sunshine warmed him happily. Howard soon came, with their dogs Billy and Blanche. The manuscript of Julian, written on yellow, lined legal-size paper, began to grow. Each morning he lived imaginatively in the fourth century. In the afternoons he walked across Rome to the American Academy, whose library had everything he needed. The streets of Rome delighted him. The balance between the ancient and the modern he felt within himself. Evenings he spent at trattorias, with friends and visitors. He had begun the most creatively fruitful decade of his life.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Delphi

  1963-1966

  On one level, the temporary move to Rome in January 1963 was an escape from a form of death. Gore had come to dislike Manhattan and New York City life. His dislike was later to rise to detestation. He felt that he could not flourish as a writer in New York, that he needed distance, not only from the city but from America as well. Even at relatively secluded Edgewater, daily distractions were unavoidable. The move to sun-filled Rome promised a long visit with classical culture and the opportunity to focus his mind and imagination fully on his work. And the Italian acceptance of the casual pleasures of daily life seemed as close to the pagan world as anyone in the modern world could come. Rome, especially for foreigners, was a happily anti-puritan place. And in Rome he could also leave behind the temptation to try for political office again, a form of death to the degree that it would always be a restriction on his imagination, his literary work, even his freedom to speak his mind. And leave as well the lure of television appearances. Taking an apartment on Via Giulia seemed likely to provide relief from their fatal attractions. More than anything he wanted to finish Julian, a novelistic canvas on which he could explore some of the coordinates of the vision he had had at Delphi. In February 1962 he had found Athens a congenial place in which to write his account of young Julian’s initiation at Eleusis. Rome seemed the right venue for him now. And if politics, television, and New York City distractions were metaphoric depredations, there were also real deaths to deal with via an imagination that so embraced living energy that the fact of death brought him as close to panic as he ever came.

  Gene Vidal’s heart attack in 1942 had changed his own life. Less directly so, his son’s. But the fear that he might suffer his father’s fate was never far from Gore’s mind. Coronary disease ran in the family on both sides. His father had never been the same again. As far as he had gone, he would go hardly any further. What seemed in retrospect to his son a golden beginning with the promise of high achievement and station had dissipated after 1942. Thereafter, his father seemed somewhat afraid of life. He had settled for much less than what he might have done and been. The heart attack seemed to Gore the turning point. As much as he deeply loved his father, he felt the disappointment. He himself feared that he might be cut off before he had his chance. With more than a touch of hypochondria, he metaphorically kept his hand on his own pulse. When it seemed possible, in late fall 1962, that Howard had thyroid cancer, their world tilted abruptly into fear. Both of them trembled for one another and for themselves. Gore’s overpowering relief when Howard’s tumor was benign steadied him. He had no doubt, though, that the strong stomach pains that he himself felt after settling at Via Giulia in January 1963 were the result of how anguished he had been during the past months. Soon after arriving in Rome, he was unhappy to learn that he had “(a) a duodenal ulcer, (b) a malfunctioning liver, (c) a spastic colon,” he wrot
e to Alice Dows, “none of these things particularly fatal but all these together depressing. But I have a good doctor (just to check on him I use a second doctor and act upon the consensus!), and I live on rice and milk…. They expect the ulcer to be gone in another two weeks.” Still, he felt like Prometheus being tortured, even if moderately. “The vulture has two heads,” he told Fred Dupee, “one to the liver bent, the other to the duodenum; but the beaks are blunt; heads droop. We regain our health, slowly.” Fortunately, “Howard is recovered.” Fred wrote back, “I hope your liver is improved, dear Prometheus—just shoo that nasty eagle away.” The dogs, though, were mimicking their masters. “Blanche nearly rode on ahead to the great shining kennel in the sky … but is finally cured of nephritis by a local vet…. Billy has had two epileptic fits.” Their maid at Via Giulia, who concluded that Billy was possessed of the devil, constantly made propitiatory signs to ward off the evil eye. Deep within the pagan sunlight, as Gore had always known, is the inescapable darkness, the evil eye of catastrophe, of death. He feared it for himself and for those he cared about. In life he always did his best to keep even the thought of it at a distance. In literature he engaged the darkness by dramatizing its marriage to light. Persephone and Pluto were in an eternal embrace. The Eleusinian Mysteries were life-enhancing. “Energy is eternal delight.” All things change except the process of change. His stoic consolation was in that.

  He could manage only a thin stoicism in the face of his grandmother’s illness. When he had seen her in late fall 1962, the sight had struck despair into his heart. By mid-1962 she was too ill to be taken for drives in the car Gore had recently bought for her. She could no longer read or write. Theresa, her maid, took care of the household; a day nurse was always on duty. When Gore came with Nini to the Crescent Place apartment in late fall 1962, Dot did not recognize him. A moment after they left, she asked Theresa who that man was, and then sent her to catch him. She was too late. “I can not express my feeling,” she told Gore, in a letter dictated to Theresa who imposed her informal grammar on Mrs. Gore’s sentences, “when I found that I did not recognize who you was when you last visited me. You seemed to have been much more slender. You looked as you did when you and I went to Key West Fla. You was my first grandchild. That will remain with me as long as I shall live.” For Christmas, he sent her two nightgowns, which she enjoyed wearing. Before leaving for Rome in mid-January, he visited again. There seemed reason to believe she would linger for months, if not years. But in late April she took a decisive turn toward death. Two strokes rendered her mostly speechless. Her kidneys began to fail. On May 8 she died. “Things were rather in a turmoil at the apartment what with Nina, Theresa, Dot’s day nurse, Roy Thompson,” and other people there. “She was holding Theresa’s hand, as they were turning her over in bed, when she died…. I distinctly remember,” Dot’s son Tom explained to Gene Vidal three weeks later, “someone say that Gore had been notified of Dot’s death, but in the intervening days, not having heard from either him or you, it raised some doubts in my mind that [either of] you were notified. A cousin of ours asked Nina a direct question on the matter in Oklahoma City, and she said that she had sent Gore a cable.”

  If so, Gore, in Rome, never received it. His first notice of Dot’s death came weeks later in a letter from Roy Thompson, as lawyer for her estate, who wanted to know Gore’s wishes about the disposition of the car registered in his name. “I know that you were distressed at not being able to be here at the last. The truth is that for quite some days before death your grandmother would not have known whether or not you were here. So be it!” Tom Gore meanwhile wrote to Gene, who forwarded the letter to Gore, “It is a blessing that she has departed the earth and is now where she longed to be for the last few years. I can honestly say that she is out of the misery she lived in.” Gore had no argument with that or with Tom Gore’s contrite apology for the failure to notify him. Tom Gore had assumed that his sister had indeed done what she claimed she had. Nini, Gore’s half-sister, might have known not to make that assumption. But Nina did not herself notify either Gore or Gene, and she had no hesitation cabling Gore on other occasions when it suited her needs. Perhaps exhaustion and shock absorbed all their mental energies. Gore of course had written Nina out of his life. Perhaps her silence and then her probable lie to her brother may have had a touch of unconscious or even conscious revenge. Probably he would not have been able, even if he had been notified immediately, to attend the funeral, and perhaps he would have preferred to stay away, as he had when his grandfather had died, from such proximity to death. In accord with her wishes, Dot’s body was taken immediately to Oklahoma City and quickly buried, with only the briefest of ceremonies, beside her husband’s in the family plot. In Rome, unaware of what was happening in the land of his ancestors, Gore went about his daily business, working on Julian in the mornings, taking long walks in the afternoons. His grandmother had frequently, in better days, reminded him that eventually he too would be called home. “‘There’s room for you, too,’ Dot would say, enticingly. ‘We can take four more.’”

  From Rome he felt that broad aspects of American politics could be seen clearly, if not more clearly, than from up close. He had decided in 1962 not to run for office again, at least for the foreseeable future. But as a compulsive observer with keen political instincts, he had not and would never forswear writing about the American political scene. That, he felt, was not in the least incompatible with his career as a novelist. He had ample energy for both, and his fiction and political essays shared an interest in the disposition of political power. As he worked on Julian, he had vividly in mind his next novel, Washington, D.C., a small part of which he had already written. And what was the Emperor Julian himself if not a masterful politician? Since the publication of his first essays in the early 1950s Vidal had, over the next decade, achieved some reputation in that form, and the publication in 1962 of Rocking the Boat had brought his essayistic skills to the appreciative attention of a wide audience. He had happily given up his post as The Reporter’s theater critic. Regular, forced playgoing bored him. But politics did not. With the encouragement of Harold Hayes, a tactful North Carolinian in his mid-thirties who in 1960 had become Esquire magazine’s managing editor, he had been doing a short political and/or literary column regularly enough so that it appeared frequently. With the support of Arnold Gingrich, Esquire’s publisher, Hayes had begun his successful effort to change Esquire from a magazine for men, providing mainly sexual titillation and fashion advice, into a general-audience anthology of sophisticated fiction and cutting-edge journalism emphasizing the personal voice. Mailer’s impressionistic account from the left of the 1960 Democratic convention had become the prototype of what was now being called the New Journalism, and Esquire attracted its most talented acolytes, like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, while it also published fiction by, among others, Truman Capote and James Baldwin. The far-right wing of the new personal journalism was represented by William F. Buckley, whose account of his worshipful fascination with Whittaker Chambers had appeared in the September 1962 issue. Esquire had suddenly become an important magazine. Hayes considered Vidal one of his premiere writers.

  Under the title “The Best Man 1968,” published in March 1963, Vidal provided Hayes with what was to be Esquire’s most widely discussed article of the year. “Was I getting revenge on Bobby for that night at the White House? Who knows? I do know it was all Harold Hayes’s idea, that piece. I made clear that I disliked Bobby for President. I also disliked Nelson Rockefeller. So I was ecumenical about the two potential candidates.” While working on Julian, Vidal took a few days soon after his arrival in Rome to cast into sharp prose his prognostications not about the upcoming 1964 but about the far-distant 1968 presidential election. Since Jack Kennedy seemed a shoo-in for 1964, the question to ask, the essay argued, is who will be the candidates for 1968? Both Vidal’s picks were wrong, for unexpected reasons. Nelson Rockfeller’s political career would not survive the Republican Party’s 1964
Goldwaterite sharp turn to the right. Two assassinations were to prevent Robert Kennedy from inheriting his brother’s crown. No one paid much attention to what Gore had to say about Rockefeller. But his depiction of Bobby as a mean, graceless, illiberal, and puritanical politician, unqualified by temperament or judgment to be President, became a widely disseminated story of its own. British and American newspapers ran accounts of the article. Some saw it as a harsh, unwarranted attack. Others found it plausible. That the author was distantly semi-related to the Kennedys made the story even more delicious, especially to those attracted to the human overtones of the frontal assault. In a devastating account of a Kennedy study group whose guest was the British philosopher A. J. Ayer, Gore highlighted Bobby’s intellectual and verbal crudeness. When Ethel Kennedy asked, in response to Ayer’s sophisticated philosophical presentation, “What about God?,” “the result was splendid comedy.” Ayer became somewhat flustered. “Bobby muttered, ‘Can it, Ethel.’ And it was canned until, at the end, Bobby asked, in perfect seriousness: ‘But don’t you believe in right and wrong?’ Ayer capitulated. This was the sort of question usually put early on to a teacher by an adolescent…. Our most admired Presidents have not been zealots. They cannot afford to be without seriously deranging the balance of the State…. In temperament, John Kennedy is perfectly suited to the Presidency. His brother is not. He would be a dangerously authoritarian-minded President.”

  Vidal and Harold Hayes had anticipated broad publicity and squeals of outrage. Walter Cronkite, on the most-watched American television network news program, held up a copy of Esquire, whose cover featured Bobby sitting in his brother’s White House rocking chair and the headline “When Bobby Kennedy Takes Over,” to illustrate his brief comment on the subject. “Sorry to hear about the ulcer,” Hayes wrote to Vidal. But “what do you have to worry about, for God’s sake, sitting it out there on the Via Giulia. I’m the one Bobby can get his hands on, not you.” But Hayes was delighted that the article was “raising quite a nice little stink.” Every major magazine and wire service picked up the story. As Vidal had predicted, Esquire’s circulation for the March issue shot up “conceivably to the highest mark we’ve reached,” Hayes reported, “in the past two or three years.” The Kennedys, though, were furious. Vidal inevitably had to pay a price for such mischief-making. Fortunately, it was a price he had been prepared to pay, even if he had not anticipated how definitive a separation from the Kennedys would result from this offense. The 1961 altercation at the White House, unpleasant as it had been, had been a private matter. That the press had picked it up as high-level gossip could hardly be held against Gore. Jackie, in fact, had essentially ignored the incident. Jack had dismissed it as another example of the meaningless bickering people close to White House power were prone to. But this, now, was a direct public attack on a cherished member of the Kennedy clan. Whatever its personal dimension, the attack was political, as if Gore had taken it on himself to affect the family’s presidential hopes for Bobby. But since it was an attack on his character, the only response available to the Kennedys was public silence and private fury. And Vidal’s attack triggered others. “Did you read the piece on Bobby in Newsweek?” he wrote to Louis Auchincloss, himself a distant cousin of Jackie’s through Hugh’s marriage to Janet. “It is savage and infinitely more documented than my casual commentary.” From New York, Auchincloss expressed his delight with the article, “which has stirred up a lot of comment. I must say that I loved it and that ‘Can it, Ethel!’ has become to me the symbol of the administration. I am tired of the Kennedys, or rather of Kennedyphilia, and I was happy to have you put the whole business on a frankly sinister basis.” Vidal reported to Hayes in March that “a courier from the White House came through town, met on the sly: ‘outrage’ in the palace.” The courier may have been Richard Goodwin, who “came to town and we had dinner…. He reports JFK’s ‘outrage’ at the piece and so forth. Bobby told a friend of mine (not knowing he was) that he could not retaliate because the attack was ‘frontal,’ this means of course that it will be next year’s taxes that send me to jail. I rather expect some funny business from him but I daresay I’ll survive it.” The situation was double-edged. As Gore recognized, some would use his attack on Bobby to condemn both himself and Bobby, and to undermine Jack. “The London papers and—of course—Time have been here to see me. I expect Time will be able to kill two birds with one stone, the Kennedys and me. I don’t look forward to their axe-job but then all things pass.” What had now passed conclusively, and perhaps without Gore’s full anticipation, was not only his friendly relationship with the President but his friendship with Jackie. The family demanded total loyalty. Jackie, who understood these matters, had no hesitation about her Kennedy commitment. Later the President’s wife was to develop her own special relationship with the President’s brother. Gore and Jackie were never to talk to one another again.